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Sunday, 27 July 2014

City Pride : Pink Lace

Yesterday Nottingham
hosted Nottinghamshire Pride. After many years of being held in the
Arboretum or Goose Fair site it has moved into the historic Lace Market and
Hockley area of the city. It feels like a home-coming, because the first ever
Pride-like event in Nottingham took place there in 1997. It was called Pink Lace.

It also gave me an idea
for a new mini-series of articles. Inspired also by my recent article on
Toronto I thought I’d do a series on individual cities and towns when they held
their Pride celebration and look at their lgbt heritage. I’ve called the series
City Pride (which includes towns and other areas).

As the Pink Lace Tour is
the newest of my lgbt tours of Nottingham I thought I’d start there. Rather
than give a review of the whole city I’ll restrict myself to the Lace market
and Hockley area and the street leading up to it from the Market Square. These
are just snapshots of Nottingham’s great wealth of lgbt heritage and I hope
I’ve chosen a varied selection for your enjoyment. There are too many lgbt
pubs, clubs and venues to mention them all. The map below shows you where
things happened.

1a)
Zara – This fashion
store is on the site a popular old pub that was here for several
centuries until 1903. Here Lord Byron’s coffin was brought to rest overnight before being
taken for burial in Hucknall several miles away. Thousands of people filed past
the coffin to pay their respects to one of the very few parliamentarians to
defend working people’s rights. Byron lived in the city centre as a child, for
part of that time at 1b).

2)
J. M. Barrie – A
large decorated wall plaque marks the location of the offices of a local
newspaper on which Barrie worked. It is said that he got the idea for Peter Pan
after watching children at play in a local park.

3)
Thurland Hall – A pub
named after a huge stately home that once stood here (I’ve outlined the extent
of the original Hall on the map). This old palace was the only building big
enough to house the court when “Queen” James I came to Nottingham, which he did
6 times, each time without his wife but with his “toy-boys”.

4)
The Bodega Club –
This was where the Scissor Sisters gave their first Nottingham performance to a
crown of less than 100 in 2003. Their subsequent 3 appearances in the city
attracted thousands.

5)
Outhouse Project – In
1998 the National Lottery gave £228,000 to help establish an lgbt centre in
Nottingham. Although the plane never came to fruition, with several sites being
considered, the office of the Outhouse Project was here. Nottingham still has
no lgbt centre.

6)
The Queen of Clubs –
Formerly known as Omega, before that Rain, before that Ice, and before that
Jacey’s. Jacey’s hit the headlines in 2001 when the council banned its weekly
male stripper show. Jacey’s pointed out that the council-run Theatre Royal had
hosted the Chippendales and was about to produce “The Full Monty”. The council
cancelled Full Monty and banned ALL male strippers (the ban has not been officially
lifted). My friend and former barista at Jacey’s, Rich Cowell, made front page
of the tabloids in 2005 when he was a Royal Navy lieutenant. He had been voted
Mr Gay Plymouth and the Navy considered disciplinary action. Rich came 2nd
in the Mr Gay UK finals.

7)
Broadway Cinema –
Nottingham’s leading independent cinema whose café-bar is my home from home. It
has hosted several exhibitions and screening for LGBT History Month and
Nottingham Pride and for many years hosted the British Film Institute’s touring
LGBT Film Festival. For Pink Lace in 1997 it provided the entertainment and
facilities.

8)
The Health Shop – A
health clinic, the base of the Gay AIDS Initiative project (GAi) which was
launched on 11 July 1994 with Sir Ian McKellen doing the official opening. The
Health Shop also provided facilities for volunteers to put together thousands
of free condom packs to be distributed around city venues. Several lgbt support
groups held meetings here. In 1999 Channel 4 television followed Health Shop
director Tim Franks for several weeks for their fly-on-the-wall series.

9)
The Masquerader – In
1913 an eccentric local character was arrested for begging. It turned out that
this cross-dressing astrologer was a Serbian war refugee. His home was on the
site of this car park.

10)
Pierrepont Hall –
another huge stately home long since demolished (the extent of the property is
marked on the map). It was the childhood home of Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu, who
married her lover’s brother to avoid becoming Mrs. Clotworthy Skeffington. She
introduced smallpox inoculation into England and popularised the Language of
Flowers.

11)
Short Hill – One of
the surviving lace worker’s tenement buildings still stands. It was the home of
Karl Wood before World War I. He became an art teacher and painter of
windmills. In 1957 he was imprisoned for his homosexuality.

12)
The Galleries of Justice –
The old city court house and jail, now the National Museum of Law. In 2008 an
exhibition commemorating Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment in Reading Jail came here.
Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, recreated Oscar’s trial in the old court
itself. Part of the exhibition included the door from Oscar’s cell, and
visitors reported hearing voices from behind it! During it’s working life as a
court this building saw one of the biggest mass prosecutions of gay men before
homosexuality was legalised – 23 men were put on trial in 1961.

If you’d like to see
your own city featured in City Pride why not let me know. Or you could write
your own article and be a guest blogger for the day. Just give me plenty of
advance notice so I can schedule it in (I usually plan one month in advance of
publication).

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About Me

I was born during a thunderstorm in the summer of 1960 and was brought up in a village in north Nottinghamshire. I attended the sort of school which practiced “history for girls, geography for boys”, but developed a love of history none-the-less.